This is a website by M. Fioretti, freelance author specialized in Free as in Freedom software and digital rights issues, co-author of the Open Government book and board member of the Free Knowledge Institute. I regularly write about digital rights and other, more or less related topics at the Stop!, which you are all invited to visit, of course.
What you will find here This other website (which you can support as explained here) is a place where I plan to slowly collect in a readable, easily usable format a lot of tips and tricks that I have discovered myself or read on some mailing lists over the years about configuration, automation and performance optimization of Linux, OpenOffice and other Free Software.

Owners of websites that remained frozen for a year or more, because the _projects _they represent also were closed, or greatly slowed down their activity, face a big problem when those projects restart: updating the website without losing all its old content is really, really hard, if not impossible. Here is how I faced this problem with an old Drupal website, with an approach that can work on many other websites running off some database.

The CentOS 6 Linux Server Cookbook is a Packt Publishing title first published in April 2013. You can buy it in paper format (about 370 pages) or as an ePUB or PDF file (black and white only, whereas the ePUB version is in colours). In general I believe, especially in these times of PRISM and widespread economic crisis, that the more people learn how to run their own Free Software servers, the better. I’ve already explained how and, above all, why we should all do this with email and (at least) social networking and online publishing. That’s why, when Packt asked me to review the Cookbook, I accepted.

Recently there have been two separate discussions on two italian Free Software mailing lists, about the meaning and obligations of the license for the source code of the educational software Scratch. In both cases, I asked (and received) confirmation of my understanding of the license directly from the “Help@Scratch”. The discussions were about two topics that are, I believe, interesting and relevant for everybody considering usage or development of Free Software, especially (but not only) in educational and non-profit contexts. Therefore, I’m publishing the answers I got from the Scratch team here (with their approval), hoping they may be useful to everybody else with the same doubts in the future (but please see the disclaimer below!).

Background

Rss is a wonderful system to get headlines of online news from many independent sources and browse them as quickly as possible, without subscribing to any website, giving away personal information and/or depending on any third-party website to aggregate everything for you.

WordPress is quick and easy to install and update, but the quicker you can make these operations the better, right? If you have shell access to the server where your WordPress copy is installed, it is possible to perform all the operations in Step 1 of the Manual WordPress Update Procedure with the shell script below. It will save you a few minutes, which may seem too little, but is great if you maintain more than one copy of WordPress. That, however, is not the main reason to use a script like this. Its bigger advantage is reducing the possibility of human error by doing things by hand, at the prompt or with the mouse is the same.

A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how I may build an advanced search utility for my own email archive. One way to make complex queries on the archive seemed to be to put it all into a relational database. Since the Dbmail system stores email in that way, I asked its developers and Harald Reindl (an email administrator at The Lounge who already uses Dbmail: I found him in the PostFix Mailing list archives) if Dbmail could be used in that way.